Life After Life

by Kate Atkinson

  He touched the back of her hand with his and said, ‘How are you?’ and she said, ‘Very well, thank you.’ His hands were still those of the architect he had been before the war, unspoilt by battle. He had been safely away from the fighting, a surveyor in the Royal Engineers, poring over maps and photographs and so on and hadn’t expected to become a combatant, wading through filthy, oily, bloody seawater being shot at from all quarters. (For he had, after all, spoken a little more of it.)

  Although the bombing was awful, he said, you could see that something good could come out of it. He was hopeful about the future (unlike Hugh or Crighton). ‘All those hovels,’ he said. Woolwich, Silvertown, Lambeth and Limehouse were being destroyed and after the war they would have to be rebuilt. It was an opportunity, he said, to build clean, modern homes with all the facilities – a community of glass and steel and air in the sky instead of Victorian slums. ‘A kind of San Gimignano for the future.’

  Ursula was unconvinced by this vision of modernist towers, if it were up to her she would rebuild the future as garden cities, comfortable little houses with cottage gardens. ‘What an old Tory you are,’ he said affectionately.

  Yet he loved the old London too (‘What architect wouldn’t?’) – Wren’s churches, the grand houses and elegant public buildings – ‘the Stones of London’, he said. One or two nights a week he was part of the St Paul’s night watch, men who were ready to climb into the rafters ‘if necessary’ to keep the great church safe from incendiaries. The place was a firetrap, he said – old timbers, lead everywhere, flat roofs, a multitude of staircases and dark forgotten places. He had answered an advertisement in the Royal Institute of British Architects’ journal, appealing for architects to volunteer to be firewatchers because they would ‘understand the plans, and so on’. ‘We might have to be pretty nimble,’ he said and Ursula wondered how he would do that with his limp. She had visions of him beleaguered by flames on all those staircases and in the dark forgotten places. It seemed a chummy kind of watch – they played chess and had long conversations about philosophy and religion. She imagined that it suited Ralph very well.

  Only a few weeks ago they had watched together, spellbound in horror, as Holland House burnt. They had been in Melbury Road, raiding the wine cellar. ‘Why not stay in my house,’ Izzie had said casually before she embarked for America. ‘You can be my caretaker. You’ll be safe here. I can’t imagine the Germans will want to bomb Holland Park.’ Ursula thought that Izzie might be rather overestimating the Luftwaffe’s precision with bombs. And if it was so safe why was Izzie turning tail and running?

  ‘No thanks,’ she said. The house was too big and empty. She had taken the key though and occasionally foraged in the house for useful things. There was still some tinned food in the cupboards that Ursula was keeping for a last-ditch emergency, and, of course, the full wine cellar.

  They were scanning the wine racks with their torches – the electricity had been turned off when Izzie left – and Ursula had just pulled a rather fine-looking bottle of Pétrus from the rack and said to Ralph, ‘Do you think this would go with potato scallops and Spam?’ when there was a terrific explosion and, thinking the house had been hit, they had thrown themselves on the hard stone floor of the cellar with their hands over their heads. This was Hugh’s advice, instilled in Ursula at a recent visit to Fox Corner. ‘Always protect your head.’ He had been in a war. She sometimes forgot. All the wine bottles had shaken and shivered in their racks and with hindsight Ursula dreaded to think what damage those bottles of Château Latour and Château d’Yquem could have done if they had rained down on them, the splintered glass like shrapnel.

  They had run outside and watched Holland House turn into a bonfire, the flames eating everything, and Ursula thought, don’t let me die in a fire. Let it be quick, please God.

  She was tremendously fond of Ralph. Not hounded by love the way some women were. With Crighton she had been teased endlessly by the idea of it, but with Ralph it was more straightforward. Again not love, more like the feelings you would have for a favourite dog (and, no, she would never have said such a thing to him. Some people, a lot of people, didn’t understand how attached one could be to a dog).

  Ralph lit another cigarette and Ursula said, ‘Harold says smoking is very bad for people. Says he’s seen lungs on operating tables that look like unswept chimneys.’

  ‘Of course it’s not good for you,’ Ralph said, lighting one for Ursula too. ‘But being bombed and shot at by the Germans isn’t good for you either.’

  ‘Don’t you wonder sometimes,’ Ursula said. ‘If just one small thing had been changed, in the past, I mean. If Hitler had died at birth, or if someone had kidnapped him as a baby and brought him up in – I don’t know, say, a Quaker household – surely things would be different.’

  ‘Do you think Quakers would kidnap a baby?’ Ralph asked mildly.

  ‘Well, if they knew what was going to happen they might.’

  ‘But nobody knows what’s going to happen. And anyway he might have turned out just the same, Quakers or no Quakers. You might have to kill him instead of kidnapping him. Could you do that? Could you kill a baby? With a gun? Or what if you had no gun, how about with your bare hands? In cold blood.’

  If I thought it would save Teddy, Ursula thought. Not just Teddy, of course, the rest of the world, too. Teddy had applied to the RAF the day after war was declared. He had been working on a small farm in Suffolk. After Oxford he had done a year at an agricultural college and then had worked on different farms and smallholdings around the country. He wanted to know everything, he said, before he got his own place. (‘A farmer?’ Sylvie still said.) He didn’t want to be one of those idealistic back-to-the-land types who ended up knee-deep in muddy yards with sickly cows and dead lambs, their crops not worth picking. (He had worked on one of those places apparently.)

  Teddy still wrote poetry and Hugh said, ‘A poet farmer, eh? Like Virgil. We’ll expect a new Georgics from you.’ Ursula wondered how Nancy felt about being a farmer’s wife. She was awfully smart, doing research at Cambridge into some arcane and bewildering aspect of maths. (‘All gibberish to me,’ Teddy said.) And now his childhood dream of becoming a pilot was suddenly and unexpectedly within reach. At the moment he was safe in Canada at an Empire Training School, learning to fly, sending home letters about how much food there was, how great the weather was, making Ursula green with envy. She wished he could stay over there for ever, out of harm’s way.

  ‘How did we end up talking about murdering babies in cold blood?’ Ursula said to Ralph. ‘Mind you,’ she cocked her head towards the wall and the rise and fall of Emil’s siren wail.

  Ralph laughed. ‘He’s not so bad tonight. Mind you, I’d go batty if my children made a racket like that.’

  Ursula thought it was interesting that he said ‘my children’, not ‘our children’. Strange to be thinking of having children at all during a time when the very existence of the future was in doubt. She stood up rather abruptly and said, ‘The raids will be starting soon.’ Back at the beginning of the Blitz they would have said, ‘They can’t come every night’, now they knew they could. (‘Is this to be life for ever,’ she wrote to Teddy, ‘to be harried without rest by the bombs?’) Fifty-six nights in a row now so that it was beginning to seem possible that there really would be no end to it.

  ‘You’re like a dog,’ Ralph said. ‘You’ve got a sixth sense for the raiders.’

  ‘Well you’d better believe me then and go. Or you’ll have to come down to the dark hole of Calcutta and you know you won’t like that.’ The sprawling Miller family, Ursula had counted at least four generations, lived on the ground floor and in the semi-basement of the house in Argyll Road. They also had access down to a further level, a subterranean cellar that the residents of the house used as an air-raid shelter. It was a maze, a mouldy, unpleasant space, full of spiders and beetles, and felt horribly crowded if they were all in there, especially once the Millers’ dog, a shapeles
s rug of fur called Billy, was dragged reluctantly down the stairs to join them. They had also, of course, to put up with the tears and lamentations of Emil, who was passed around between the cellar occupants like an unwanted parcel in a futile attempt to pacify him.

  Mr Miller, in an effort to make the cellar ‘homely’ (something it could never be), had taped some reproductions of ‘great English art’, as he called it, against the sandbagged walls. These colour plates – The Haywain, Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews (how smug they looked) and Bubbles (the most sickly Millais possible, in Ursula’s opinion) – looked suspiciously as if they had been pilfered from expensive reference books on art. ‘Culture,’ Mr Miller said, nodding sagely. Ursula wondered what she would have chosen to represent ‘great English art’. Turner perhaps, the smudged, fugitive content of the late works. Not to the Millers’ taste at all, she suspected.

  She had sewn the collar on her blouse. She had switched off the Sturm und Drang of the wireless broadcast and listened instead to Ma Rainey singing ‘Yonder Come the Blues’ – an antidote to all the easy sentiment that was beginning to pour out of the wireless. And she had eaten bread and cheese with Ralph, attempted the crossword and then hurried him out of the door with a kiss. Then she had turned off the light and moved the blackout aside so that she could catch a glimpse of him walking away down Argyll Road. Despite his limp (or perhaps because of it) he had a buoyant gait as if he was expecting something interesting to cross his path. It reminded her of Teddy.

  He knew that she was watching him but he didn’t look back, simply raised an arm in silent salute and was swallowed by the dark. There was some light though, a bright slice of crescent moon and a scattering of the faintest stars as though someone had flung a handful of diamond dust into the dark. The Queen-Moon, surrounded by all her starry Fays, although she suspected Keats was writing about a full moon and the moon above Argyll Road seemed more like a moon-in-waiting. She was in a – rather poor – poetic mood. It was the enormity of war, she thought, it left you scrabbling for ways to think about it.

  Bridget always said it was bad luck to look at the moon through glass and Ursula let the blind fall back into place and closed the curtains tightly.

  Ralph was casual with his safety. After Dunkirk, he said, he felt proofed against sudden violent death. It seemed to Ursula that in a time of war, when one was surrounded by an immense amount of sudden violent death, the odds were quite changed and it was impossible to be protected from anything.

  As she knew it would, the caterwauling commenced, followed swiftly by the guns in Hyde Park starting up and the noise of the first bombs, over the docks again by the sound of it. She was galvanized into action, snatching her torch from the hook beside the front door where it lived like a holy relic, picking up her book, also kept by the door. It was her ‘shelter book’ – Du côté de chez Swann. Now that the war looked as if it were going to last for ever Ursula had decided she might as well embark on Proust.

  The planes whined overhead and then she heard the fearsome swish of a bomb descending and then a walloping thump! as it landed somewhere nearby. Sometimes an explosion sounded much closer than it actually was. (How quickly one acquired new knowledge in the most unlikely subjects.) She looked for her shelter suit. She was wearing a rather flimsy dress considering the season and it was horribly cold and damp in the cellar. The shelter suit had been bought by Sylvie, up in town for the day not long before the bombing started. They had gone for a stroll along Piccadilly and Sylvie had spotted an advertisement in Simpson’s window for ‘tailored shelter suits’ and insisted that they go in and try them on. Ursula couldn’t imagine her mother in a shelter, let alone a shelter suit, but it was clearly a garment, a uniform even, that attracted Sylvie. ‘It’ll be rather good for mucking out hens,’ she said and bought them one each.

  The next massive bang had an urgency to it and Ursula abandoned her search for the dratted suit and instead she grabbed the blanket of woollen squares crocheted by Bridget. (‘I was going to parcel it up and send it off to the Red Cross,’ Bridget had written in her round schoolgirl’s hand, ‘but then I thought you might need it more.’

  ‘You see, even within my own family I have the status of a refugee,’ Ursula wrote to Pamela.)

  She passed the Nesbit sisters on the stairs. ‘Ooh, bad luck, Miss Todd,’ Lavinia giggled. ‘Crossing on the stairs, you know.’

  Ursula was going down, the sisters were coming up. ‘You’re going the wrong way,’ she said, rather pointlessly.

  ‘I forgot my knitting,’ Lavinia said. She was wearing an enamel brooch shaped like a black cat. A little rhinestone winked for an eye. ‘She’s knitting leggings for Mrs Appleyard’s baby,’ Ruth said. ‘It’s so cold in their flat.’ Ursula wondered how many more knitted garments could be applied to the poor child before it resembled a sheep. Not a lamb. Nothing lamb-like about the Appleyard infant. Emil, she reminded herself.

  ‘Well, do hurry, won’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,’ Mr Miller said as they trooped, one by one, into the cellar. A ragtag assortment of chairs and temporary bedding filled the dank space. There were two ancient army camp beds that Mr Miller had scrounged from somewhere and on which the Nesbits were persuaded to rest their elderly bones. In the current absence of either sister, Billy the dog had installed himself on one of them. There was also a small spirit stove and an Aladdin paraffin stove, both of which seemed to Ursula extraordinarily dangerous items to be in such proximity when people were dropping bombs on you. (The Millers were effortlessly sanguine in the face of jeopardy.)

  The roll-call was almost complete – Mrs Appleyard and Emil, the queer fish Mr Bentley, Miss Hartnell and the full complement of Millers. Mrs Miller voiced her concern for the whereabouts of the Nesbits and Mr Miller volunteered to go and hurry them up (‘ruddy knitting and all’) but just then a tremendous explosion rocked the cellar. Ursula felt the foundations trembling as the blast moved through the earth beneath her. Obedient to Hugh’s directive, she dropped to the floor with her hands over her head, grabbing the nearest of the smaller Miller boys (‘Oi, get your hands off me!’) on the way down. She crouched awkwardly over him but he wriggled away from her.

  All went quiet.

  ‘That wasn’t our house,’ the boy said dismissively, swaggering a little to restore his wounded male dignity.

  Mrs Appleyard had also thrown herself to the floor, the baby soft-shelled beneath her. Mrs Miller had clutched not one of her brood but the old Farrah’s Harrogate toffee tin that contained her savings and insurance policies.

  Mr Bentley, his voice sounding a quaver higher than normal, asked, ‘Was that us?’ No, thought Ursula, we would be dead if it had been. She sat down again on one of the rickety bentwood chairs provided by Mr Miller. She could feel her heart, too loud. She began to shiver and wrapped herself in Bridget’s crochet.

  ‘Nah, the boy’s right,’ Mr Miller said, ‘that sounded like Essex Villas.’ Mr Miller always professed to know where the bombs were dropping. Surprisingly, he was often correct. All of the Millers were adept at wartime language as well as wartime spirit. They could all take it. (‘And we can give it out too, can’t we?’ Pamela wrote. ‘You would think we had no blood on our hands.’)

  ‘The backbone of England, no doubt,’ Sylvie said to Ursula on first (and last) acquaintance with them. Mrs Miller had invited Sylvie down to her kitchen for a cup of tea but Sylvie was still cross at the state of Ursula’s curtains and rugs, for which she blamed Mrs Miller, under the apprehension that she was the landlady and not merely another renter. (She was deaf to Ursula’s explanations.) Sylvie behaved as though she were a duchess visiting the cottage of one of her rustic tenants. Ursula imagined Mrs Miller later saying to Mr Miller, ‘Hoity-toity, that one.’

  Up above, the racket of a steady bombardment was now under way, they could hear the timpani of the big bombs, the whistling of shells and the thunder of a nearby mobile artillery unit. Every now and then the foundat
ions of the cellar shook with a crump and thump and bump as the bombs hammered down on the city. Emil howled, Billy the dog howled, a couple of the smallest Millers howled. All in discord with each other, an unwelcome counterpoint to the Donner und Blitzen of the Luftwaffe. A terrible, endless storm. Despair behind, and death before.

  ‘Crikey, old Fritz is really trying to put the wind up us tonight,’ Mr Miller said, calmly adjusting a lamp for all the world as if they were on a camping trip. He was responsible for morale in the cellar. Like Hugh, he had lived through the trenches and claimed that he was impervious to threats from Jerry. There was a whole club of them, Crighton, Ralph, Mr Miller, even Hugh, who had undergone their ordeal by fire and mud and water and who presumed it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

  ‘What’s old Fritz up to, eh?’ he said soothingly to one of the smaller, more frightened children. ‘Trying to stop me getting my beauty sleep?’ The Germans always came singularly for Mr Miller in the person of Fritz and Jerry, Otto, Hermann, Hans, sometimes Adolf himself was four miles up dropping his high explosive.

  Mrs Miller (Dolly), an embodiment of the triumph of experience over hope (unlike her spouse), was doling out ‘refreshments’ of tea, cocoa, biscuits and bread and margarine. The Millers, a family of generous morals, were never short of rations thanks to Renee, their eldest daughter, who had ‘connections’. Renee was eighteen and fully formed in every way and seemed to be a girl of most easy virtue. Miss Hartnell made it clear that she found Renee very wanting indeed although she was not averse to sharing in the provender that she brought home. Ursula got the impression that one of the smaller Miller children was actually Renee’s rather than Mrs Miller’s and had, in a pragmatic way, simply been absorbed into the family pool.

  Renee’s ‘connections’ were ambiguous but a few weeks ago Ursula had spotted her in the first-floor coffee lounge of the Charing Cross Hotel sipping daintily on gin in the company of a sleek and rather prosperous-looking man who had ‘racketeer’ written all over him.